What's happened to Jerry Dixon Jr. since the Kentucky Derby?

Article by Ken Snyder

There is always someone absent from the post-Kentucky Derby press conference presenting the winning owner, trainer, and jockey to the media.  If you consider the missing person is the individual closest to the winning horse who spends the most time with them, it doesn’t make sense. It also carves away from reportage a beautiful dimension to horse racing. Absent this year, as is always the case, was the groom. Jerry Dixon, Jr. had work to do: lead Rich Strike to the test barn and then to the horse’s barn for a bath and feed. 

Today, four short months later, Dixon is absent from Derby-winning trainer Eric Reed’s barn. He mucks stalls now for trainer David Wilson, Jr. at Belterra Park in Cincinnati, 107 miles northeast of Louisville and Churchill Downs and eons away in terms of racing prestige. The last horse Dixon took to a paddock at the time of writing was for another Belterra trainer in a $5,000 claiming race. The reasons for Dixon’s departure from Reed are undisclosed, private, and depending on whom you ask, likely to be disputed.  

It’s the racetrack.  

The sport of racing demands resilience to disappointment and occasional heartbreak. Ask Steve Asmussen, maybe the hardest working trainer on the racetrack, who is the all-time leader in wins but winless with 24 Derby starters. The very best trainers like Asmussen see roughly only one out of five of their horses winning. Horses purchased for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and occasionally seven figures, flop as racehorses or worse—suffer an injury. Many never make it to the racetrack at all. As for horse owners, there’s an old joke that you can become a millionaire owning racehorses…if you start out as a billionaire. It’s a tough sport. But it has a soul.

That soul is manifested in people like Jerry Dixon, someone who, in less than half a year, has gone from the highest of highs to, well, Belterra Park. 

Whatever may have happened with Jerry, there’s no denying in the opinion of many that he gave Rich Strike all of himself. Lindsy Reed, Eric’s daughter, perhaps overstated it only minimally when she said in the wake of the Derby that “Jerry didn’t let that horse out of his sight” during the two weeks the horse was stabled at Churchill Downs before the big race. Horse and groom adopted the same rest schedule, and Jerry slept on bags of wood shavings with his head in Rich Strike’s stall. He would also lie down in the stall. Waking up was left to Rich Strike who, Dixon said, would drop hay or drip water on him to wake him up. 

In all sports, there are relationships between teammates, player and coach, and competitors—the best example being jockeys who are de facto guardians of each other’s lives. But horse racing, all by itself, offers animal and human relationships with discoveries that, if they don’t touch you someplace in your heart, they should. There is a unique bond not duplicated between humans. Grooms and horses develop their own language—a kind of telepathy that no other person shares. A good, if not great, groom like Dixon (and he falls more to the latter of those two adjectives) is the protector, caretaker and “interpreter” for the horse, reading the body, the behavior and most importantly the changes that tell a groom first, and subsequently a trainer and others, how the horse is doing and what might be expected. Dixon did all these things in the crucial two weeks leading up to the astounding triumph of an 80-to-one longshot. 

Breaking the bond has not been easy for Dixon.

“I think about Rich Strike every day. I go through my phone and look at pictures. I even look at the Derby still.”    

Dixon’s pairing with Rich Strike and the relationship that followed was not happenstance but one that was carefully considered and thought through by Eric Reed and others, given the already apparent talent of the horse well before the Derby. 

Lindsy Reed introduced Dixon to Rich Strike at her family’s training center after her dad claimed him out of a race at Ellis Park. “’I’m going to leave you and Richie alone,’” Lindsy told Dixon and, without another word, walked off, leaving Dixon befuddled and a tad fearful. He knew of the horse’s potential and his importance to the stable. Whether it was a test for Dixon isn’t known but likely. 

“So, he didn’t eat you alive,” Lindsy said when she returned to Dixon and Rich Strike. The horse had stood quietly, allowing Dixon to pet him, prompting her to say, “He likes you.” She said nothing more.  That may have been when he won the job of the groom for Rich Strike. Before this introduction, trainer Eric Reed had seen what he called a “soft touch” with horses in Dixon that he felt might suit Rich Strike.

The choice of the relatively young Dixon, 31, who has worked on the racetrack for several trainers (including Shug McGaughey), proved to be a good one. Horse and groom established a bond that was relaxing to the energetic, if not high-strung, three-year-old.

Dixon laying down in the stall became Rich Strike’s cue to lay down as well. 

Some waking hours were not so easy, however.  

A few days before the Derby, Dixon needed to jog Rich Strike in front of the state veterinarian as required. “I was trying to jog Rich Strike, and he kind of just wanted to walk. Once I smooched to him a little bit to jog, he wanted to put his two front hooves in my pockets.” Rearing up in protest provided a clear message:  “I’d rather not jog—maybe another time.

“I was watching the way he was training every morning. He got better and better every day; that was the biggest indicator [of coming performance]. He would bow his neck every morning while he was going. It didn’t matter if it was the day after we breezed him.” Fast recovery from a prior-day breeze or timed workout seemed to have no effect. It was what impressed Dixon most about Rich Strike before the Derby. 

Watching a horse and knowing what you are seeing are two very different things. Dixon knew what he was seeing, and it pointed to everything coming up roses, as in the garland draped over Derby winners.  He was confident the horse could at least hit the board in the Derby, and the win was not a total shock.  “He loved the racetrack.” 

A win belongs first to the horse and jockey and, of course a team—starting with the owner who writes the checks, the trainer, the groom, down to the hotwalker.  

As for the post-Derby press conference, Dixon had a job to do, which he had done hundreds of times:  get his horse back to the barn after a race. It’s hard to imagine this quiet, extremely polite young man, who liberally sprinkles “sirs” or “ma’ams” in his conversation, seeking or enjoying the spotlight. He was where he wanted to be: with the horse.  

There were tears and a lot of them for Dixon in the wake of Rich Strike’s Derby victory.  

There were tears, too, when the relationship between Dixon and Rich Strike came to an end.  Psychologists might say Dixon is going through the stages of grief. Whatever the reason Dixon said, “it’s probably going to take a while to jump back in the stall and feel like I’m doing right for a horse.

“I know I still have the eye for it and the talent for it. It’s all about wanting to do it.”

In the meantime, he bides his time raking out soiled straw from stalls, pushing it in a wheelbarrow to a collection area, and spreading fresh straw. It is menial and mindless, but it keeps Dixon home in Cincinnati with his wife and daughter.

The Triple Crown trail, with its excitement and attention from the media and racing world, was “living the dream,” usually expressed sarcastically but true for Dixon. But it had a downside.  

“It’s hard to have a family. You have to be all the way in or not at all,” said Dixon. All is demanded of every racetracker who wants to succeed in racing, from trainer to hotwalker. “My wife and daughter missed the family time they wanted to have with me while I was chasing my dream.  

“Stepping away from grooming has given me downtime with my family.”

The racetrack itself is also family for Dixon. A lady in the racing office at Belterra has talked to him daily, telling him over and over, “’Don’t forget. You’re a part of that horse winning the Kentucky Derby.’ 

“She’s making sure I’m all right. I know where it’s coming from. It's not people just being kind.” 

History is unerasable no matter what is going on in the present or what may come in the future. Dixon obviously heeds the encouragement of the lady in the Belterra racing office. “He won the biggest race in America. That solidifies his greatness. I’m part of the history with the horse.”  

Jerry is a fourth-generation horseman, but he and he alone accomplished something no one in his family ever did or likely ever will do. Forevermore, he will be pointed out to generations of Dixons that follow: that Jerry Junior was a groom for a Derby winner.

On a recent muggy summer morning at Belterra as Jerry mucked stalls and spread new straw, an aged hotwalker passing by stopped to ask if I had ever interviewed a Derby-winning trainer (yes) or jockey (yes). “Have you ever interviewed a Derby-winning groom?” he asked with a smile and a twinkle in his eye, knowing the answer as he pointed to Jerry Dixon, Jr.  

Racing, again, has its ups and downs, but the triumphs are permanent.     

A Kentucky Derby is what people around the world see. What’s not seen is the day-to-day that gets a Derby starter and all other horses down to the cheapest claimer to the starting gate.  

For grooms, days can begin as early as 4:00 a.m. in pitch-black darkness, of course, with bathing horses, tacking them up, and readying them for workouts. In Jerry Dixon Jr.’s case, past roles in various barns included coating legs with medication, then applying bandages or wraps, and sending a horse out under an exercise rider. The process is repeated on a second horse while the first is out on the track. When horses return, they must be bathed, their legs medicated, or simply wrapped again and fed. The merry-go-round of horses going out and coming back in from workouts, and the work needed for each horse, is virtually non-stop through 10:30 or 11 a.m.

The day, however, isn’t over. There’s an afternoon feeding, and on race days, there’s taking a horse to the paddock before a race, getting them back to the barn, bathing and feeding. During racing at Turfway Park just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, which has night racing, the day begins at 5 a.m. for Dixon and can end as late as 10:45 or 11 p.m., if one of the horses in his care runs in the last race. “I don’t get home till midnight,” he said.

His hours during racing at Belterra are only marginally better. He has to be at the track at 4 a.m. and be there at least through feed time at 5:30 in the afternoon. A horse in the last race of the day means an extra hour at the track.  

The job is a tough one and getting tougher all the time as not just most, but all racetracks have a shortage of barn help. The shortages, according to Dixon, are going to mean “somebody is getting cheated.” Something as obvious as a missing horseshoe can be overlooked in the rapid-fire process of getting horses out for workouts in the morning. “There are so many horses and so few people with a limited amount of time to get things done.” 

There are other issues related to an individual trainer’s style and the regard with which they hold grooms. “Sometimes it feels like people look at the grooms as if they’re just workers and not in the aspect of being a part of the organization to have some knowledge to be able to give back to the trainer, the assistant, or whoever. Like I’ve said, we spend more time with the horse than anybody else does.  We’ll see something before the trainer will. I’ve been in barns where you don’t see the trainer. It’s more of a phone type of deal.”

It’s not uncommon for grooms to sometimes double as assistant trainers, managing the barn for stables—something Jerry did at Turfway. “If we had horses in, I’d make sure I was in contact with the vet. I’d get the Lasix, or, if we had any problems, make sure we got any medication needed for the horse, take them to the races, cool them out, load them on the trailer, unload them—everything,” he said. 

Races were, of course, after a full morning. “I would get there and do the stalls, do the groundwork, get the horses out with the exercise riders—find out how far we would train the horses each day. 

Days off are two Sundays a month…maybe. 

Dixon credits Eric Reed and his daughter Lindsy; other trainers; Reed’s groom Benito Luna, who now cares for Rich Strike; and members of his own family—his father and uncles he describes as “great horsemen”—for mentoring and helping him in his career.

It is a career that is not over. He plans to take the test for a trainer’s license and hang his own shingle perhaps as early as later this year.